A moral dilemma

[anamardoll]

I never cease to be amazed at the internet ratio of empathy to entitlement. Yes, of course the OP should have spent hundreds of dollars on Windows Home Server and off-site hard drives and cloud storage. It all makes sense now! I'm only surprised his butler didn't take care of that before this disaster -- I hope the OP has his people sternly punished for this.

I've been buying 1s and 0s since I was a kid. In those primitive and early days of the internet, it was understood that when you bought data, the company had an obligation to honor that contract even if you lost the data later. I still fondly recall the people at Spiderweb Software re-sending me my registration codes for Exile (now Avernum) after a disk crash. They did so because we believed -- and this is so primitive you'll wonder how we ever survived -- that replacing digital data that cost the company nothing to send was not the same thing as replacing physical media.

In these enlightened times, of course, we've evolved past that. Someone who spends $1,000 on digital data ($10 a book for 100 books) gets to also spend thousands of dollars on backups. If those backups fail or are stolen or if the cloud company goes out of business, then the onus is on the customer to re-spend those $1,000. Why shouldn't it be? Replacing that data for free would cost the publishing company thousands of their own dollars and negatively impact the other customers... oh wait. Well, hmm.

Sounds like I can only tell you that this is your Own Dang Fault and you should be out thousands of dollars based on the principle that...uh...I don't like your face. Or something.

Man, I sure do miss the early days. God bless Spiderweb Software. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make sure that Jeeves is ready to ferry my external hard drive to Fort Knox via the armored truck service I own. Can't be too careful.

[Pinecone]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Agreed. It's not the publisher or sellers of a paper books responsibility to replace it for you if it is lost, destroyed or damaged.

But pbooks can be sold or traded or given away.

Ebooks publsihers keep saying that you cannot do that, because they only LICENSE the content to you, they do not SELL it to you.

So the same rules don't apply to both forms. One is physically sold, the other only licensed.

[Pinecone]

Bottom line is, it is a personal decision. And you have to live with what you decide.

If you are comfortable with gathering the content from other sources, and keeping it. Go for it. If you are not comfortable with doing so, don't.

What I (or others) do or say or think has nothing to do with it.

[Angst]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Sony does allow for subsequent downloads. Hell, when they switched from the BBeB LRF/LRX format to ePub, they recommended that people redownload the books they've bought so they could get an ePub version (partially due to some people complaining that LRF books looked different than ePub).

I was able to re-download the books I had bought from the Sony Reader Store. It's just the books I bought from Fictionwise, and a few from Books-on-Board that I can no longer download.

100 Books @ about $5 a book hurts. Especially the books I bought but hadn't read. Loved those 50% Fictionwise sales!

BTW. I was backing up my hard drive. I had set Calibre to store the books in a non-standard directory and hadn't realized that directory was not being backed up.

Fortunately I was able to save my music library. Oddly, if I had lost my music library, I would have been able to restore most, if not all, of it. Between Amazon Digital, iTunes and my CDs I could have saved 99% of it.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'd go further, and say you'd be morally OK to go and download copies of the books you paid for from anywhere you can find them.

You've paid for the ebooks. It shouldn't matter whether you made the backups yourself, or relied on some kind third-party to do so.

That would work but I've found that pirated copy's are usually badly formatted with tons of typos and no paragraph spacing on some. I'd say get it anyway you want.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

That would work but I've found that pirated copy's are usually badly formatted with tons of typos and no paragraph spacing on some. I'd say get it anyway you want.

Not all the time, no. Some scanners take great care in reproducing dead tree books into digital form, with lots of proofreading and editing.

[monkeygirl351]

I would have no problem doing it. In essence, buying an ebook is just buying a license to read the book. I believe that is totally different than having a physical copy. Unless you strip the drm, the book isn't really yours. Now that these companies have stopped providing service you are pretty much sol unless you strip them or get them elsewhere.
Now to the people that say oh well it is the same as if your house burnt down. I don't believe that. If my house burns down, I have insurance and would be able to use that to replace the lost books. Physical books don't go away with a computer crash, and I can still use the books that I bought at borders even though they are mo longer a company, so comparing the two as similar shouldn't be done. I will also say, that now that you know this can happen, be sure to back up those books, and don't rely on any company to do it for you. My procedure for getting books, is to purchase said book, import to calibre, strip any drm, then backup. Only after that is done do I put it on my kindle. My backups include, an external hard drive, a flash drive and a cloud storage called sugar sync, that backs up my calibre library folder anytime I add to it. I also have amazon if all else fails, but they are my last resort, as I actually buy very little from them and mainly get their freebies.
Basically, do what ever you have to to get your books as you paid for their license. Then make sure you back up.

[carpetmojo]

Hello monkeygirl, [ Mod's -don't know if I'm allowed to do this, tell me & I'll PM] Isaw you back-up your ebooks once you've d/loaded, DRM'd 'em, etc..

How do you back them up please ? I keep the original download in my download panel, but what do I do next ?

I'm not, as most will know, the world's most adept tech-handler !

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Angst

I was able to re-download the books I had bought from the Sony Reader Store. It's just the books I bought from Fictionwise, and a few from Books-on-Board that I can no longer download.

100 Books @ about $5 a book hurts. Especially the books I bought but hadn't read. Loved those 50% Fictionwise sales!

BTW. I was backing up my hard drive. I had set Calibre to store the books in a non-standard directory and hadn't realized that directory was not being backed up.

Fortunately I was able to save my music library. Oddly, if I had lost my music library, I would have been able to restore most, if not all, of it. Between Amazon Digital, iTunes and my CDs I could have saved 99% of it.

I'm so sorry man.

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I never cease to be amazed at the internet ratio of empathy to entitlement. Yes, of course the OP should have spent hundreds of dollars on Windows Home Server and off-site hard drives and cloud storage. It all makes sense now! I'm only surprised his butler didn't take care of that before this disaster -- I hope the OP has his people sternly punished for this.

I've been buying 1s and 0s since I was a kid. In those primitive and early days of the internet, it was understood that when you bought data, the company had an obligation to honor that contract even if you lost the data later. I still fondly recall the people at Spiderweb Software re-sending me my registration codes for Exile (now Avernum) after a disk crash. They did so because we believed -- and this is so primitive you'll wonder how we ever survived -- that replacing digital data that cost the company nothing to send was not the same thing as replacing physical media.

In these enlightened times, of course, we've evolved past that. Someone who spends $1,000 on digital data ($10 a book for 100 books) gets to also spend thousands of dollars on backups. If those backups fail or are stolen or if the cloud company goes out of business, then the onus is on the customer to re-spend those $1,000. Why shouldn't it be? Replacing that data for free would cost the publishing company thousands of their own dollars and negatively impact the other customers... oh wait. Well, hmm.

Sounds like I can only tell you that this is your Own Dang Fault and you should be out thousands of dollars based on the principle that...uh...I don't like your face. Or something.

Man, I sure do miss the early days. God bless Spiderweb Software. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make sure that Jeeves is ready to ferry my external hard drive to Fort Knox via the armored truck service I own. Can't be too careful.

I don't think people are being heartless. The OP asked a question and received responses. I don't think they were preachy or cruel.

People talk about not wanting to buy from Amazon or BN or any walled system and that is fine. But you take risks when you do that. It sounds like the OP was doing everything that he/she can do but missed one step, a step I have not done yet. I have not done it because all of my books are from Amazon and I trust that they are going to be there.

If something happens and that is not the case and I have not saved them elsewhere that is my bad. I recently got hit with a virus and learned that lesson the hard way. My Hubby was able to clean it off and save everything but I am going to be doing some serious saving over the weekend.

[ucfgrad93]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I don't think people are being heartless. The OP asked a question and received responses. I don't think they were preachy or cruel.

People talk about not wanting to buy from Amazon or BN or any walled system and that is fine. But you take risks when you do that. It sounds like the OP was doing everything that he/she can do but missed one step, a step I have not done yet. I have not done it because all of my books are from Amazon and I trust that they are going to be there.

If something happens and that is not the case and I have not saved them elsewhere that is my bad. I recently got hit with a virus and learned that lesson the hard way. My Hubby was able to clean it off and save everything but I am going to be doing some serious saving over the weekend.

Agreed. Yeah, it totally sucks that the OP could possibly loose the books he paid for. But the providers of those books are not obligated to replace them, nor is the OP entitled to free replacements.

Unfortunately, this is one of those life lessons. The OP will better manage his backups in the future. Just like I did, after I had a harddrive crash and I lost everything.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I don't think people are being heartless. The OP asked a question and received responses. I don't think they were preachy or cruel.

People talk about not wanting to buy from Amazon or BN or any walled system and that is fine. But you take risks when you do that. It sounds like the OP was doing everything that he/she can do but missed one step, a step I have not done yet. I have not done it because all of my books are from Amazon and I trust that they are going to be there.

If something happens and that is not the case and I have not saved them elsewhere that is my bad. I recently got hit with a virus and learned that lesson the hard way. My Hubby was able to clean it off and save everything but I am going to be doing some serious saving over the weekend.

Part of why I don't like walled gardens, they can still fail, and if you rely on them you're at a loss. Most ebook stores allow subsequent downloads, so many do not backup because they trust they do not need to. Here Fictionwise had an issue with a publisher, and now no one can redownload books from that publisher. If you lived out side of the garden, you'd have not expected to rely on others as much, and most likely had backups.

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by wannabee

I'm sure if you contacted the stores you bought books from they would have a record of the books you bought licenses for on your account. Since you still have a license to read those books you need to make a case that you lost the content due to device failure without backup.

That would have to be easier than finding them from god knows where and removing the DRM. Especially considering the quantity you were talking about.

I've heard of this happening at Amzon and when he logged in, all his previous books where there waiting for him.

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

I tried this with Fictionwise when Random House pulled several titles I had purchased from Fictionwise. I appealed to Fictionwise, several times. I appealed to Random House. Neither would give me access to the ebooks I had paid for. They still appear in my Fictionwise Bookshelf on my account, but when I try to download them there is an error message.

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I don't think people are being heartless. The OP asked a question and received responses. I don't think they were preachy or cruel.

People talk about not wanting to buy from Amazon or BN or any walled system and that is fine. But you take risks when you do that. It sounds like the OP was doing everything that he/she can do but missed one step, a step I have not done yet. I have not done it because all of my books are from Amazon and I trust that they are going to be there.

If something happens and that is not the case and I have not saved them elsewhere that is my bad. I recently got hit with a virus and learned that lesson the hard way. My Hubby was able to clean it off and save everything but I am going to be doing some serious saving over the weekend.

I wonder if the threat of class action would change their attitude?

Maybe time to start another thread!

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I don't think people are being heartless. The OP asked a question and received responses. I don't think they were preachy or cruel.

I will direct you to the posts in this thread that tell the OP that this is All His Fault for not having the perfect backup system. That would be (a) lack of empathy and (b) entitlement. At least, that's how momma raised me, since you asked.

Also, the "walled system" argument is not relevant here. Best I can tell, the OP bought from Fictionwise for the coupons, not because he doesn't like Amazon, B&N, whatever. His books are no longer available as he had reasonably expected them to be. HE has been defrauded by the publishers. Well, that's my take on it.

Originally Posted by ucfgrad93

Agreed. Yeah, it totally sucks that the OP could possibly loose the books he paid for. But the providers of those books are not obligated to replace them, nor is the OP entitled to free replacements.

The providers of the book agreed to provide them, until they decided they didn't want to work with Fictionwise anymore and pulled their content.

And, yes, they are (morally) obligated to provide free replacements. It's not going to cost them anything to do so -- this is not physical media here. If it costs them nothing to provide the data AND the data was bought with a reasonable expectation of future download capability, then the onus is (morally) on them to do so.

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

Hello monkeygirl, [ Mod's -don't know if I'm allowed to do this, tell me & I'll PM] Isaw you back-up your ebooks once you've d/loaded, DRM'd 'em, etc..

How do you back them up please ? I keep the original download in my download panel, but what do I do next ?

I'm not, as most will know, the world's most adept tech-handler !

Not monkeygirl, but I use an external hard drive and flash drive and a program called Second Copy. Very easy to use.

http://www.secondcopy.com/index.html

Carol